Episode 22: Kirsty Dunlop & Maria Sledmere - “Small Presses Are Infrastructure”

Join us for a cool milestone in our first-ever transatlantic episode. We interview Kirsty Dunlop and Maria Sledmere, Glasgow-based post-internet poetics prophets and editors of the heroic UK online and IRL publisher SPAM Zine & Press. The origins of this convo are in ZP’s infatuation with UK pamphlet culture, where, one day, he noticed that the unit of literary-cultural production we usually refer to as a “chapbook” here in the US tends to get called something different among small press writers and publishers in the UK—not always “chapbook” but, perhaps more frequently, “pamphlet.” While the linguistic difference between “pamphlet” and “chapbook” may seem arbitrary—and maybe is in the end, but listen, some of us have an illness called Being a Poet—we can’t help noticing that along these terminological alignments there seem to also lie some real material, aesthetic, and political differences. Emotional ones, too.

For expert help straightening this all out, we consult Kirsty and Maria, who tell us about SPAM’s origins and aims as a whimsical yet rigorous transmedial platform for on/offline poetry and performance, criticism and collaboration, excitement and experimentation. Our conversation forefronts the work of editing as cultivating the social life of literature, while we gloss the symbiosis of publishing and programming, tripping over the classic DIY, nonprofit, and post-professional perils and possibilities. We also take this opportunity to think about whether the different infrastructures that support life in our countries lead to the production of different kinds of literature, if we can tell. Put another way, what do public transit and healthcare have to do with poems? Look, all we know is we could use a just little more of what they have over there, over here. And if the recent stateside boom of new presses and mags is any indicator, we’re well on our way, but it’s bound to be different. Watch this space.

A few more UK small press pamphlet purveyors we personally love, some of whom are mentioned in the ep, but some we forgot because we get nervous: Slub Press, Broken Sleep Books, If a Leaf Falls Press, VIBE. See also: Glaswegian proto-internet poet and Scotland’s first Makar, Edwin Morgan; SPAM’s Brilliant Vibrating Interface and just a few of our personal fave, SPAM, book-objects; Ludd Gang magazine and the Poets’ Hardship Fund; Glasgow cooperative bookmaking studio and independent bookseller Good Press; Mathias Svalina’s Dream Delivery Service. Oh dang, looks like we mixed up the decades of the Mimeo Revolution! Whoopsie.

Episode 21: Sony Ton-Aimé - “Facilitating Grace”

In this ep we get into “arts administration”: how to do it well, why maybe it should be called something else, and what small presses can offer literary programs of all sizes. We talk with one of the best in the field, literary organizer Sony Ton-Aimé, currently executive director of Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures and formerly director of literary arts at the Chautauqua Institution. Sony talks about how programs like these reach and activate readers and shares his insight on how to build community practices and empowering conversations between readers and writers. How do you cultivate agency in your audience? How do you create meaningful events? What does it mean to be a good host? How can organizational and curatorial work help create openness, grace, and a readiness to learn and be challenged? We try to answer it all and see what small presses can teach us.

A couple books get mentioned along the way, including Antonia Hylton’s Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum and Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the World Around Us. And we highly recommend checking out some of Sony’s recent work, for example “Awe Studies: Resisting Awe” and “A Killing Two Hundred Years in the Making: On Haiti and the Narrative of Empire.”

Episode 20: Noor Hindi & George Abraham - “Structures for Abundance”

In this episode we talk with poets Noor Hindi and George Abraham about Heaven Looks Like Us, a new anthology of Palestinian poetry they co-edited, forthcoming from Haymarket Books in May 2025. We discuss their process and priorities for this project, which began in 2020 and continues amid the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Noor and George share ways they’ve framed and responded to the challenges and opportunities of anthology editing, and how they’ve grappled with anthologizing’s pitfalls of reduction, representation, canonization, and exclusion. Instead Heaven Looks Like Us is offered as a fresh site of radical connection, newness, abundance, and Palestinian futurity. Under conditions of hyper-visibility, where we see atrocity unfold in real time, what is the role of the book as a technology for interacting, knowing, and imagining deeper? We talk about it, interrogating the roles of institutions and time and money, theorizing strategies for reclaiming those resources and building new structures, amid and through the work of editing. We try to understand what that work even is. Poetry expands the question.

This episode opens with George and Noor reading poems by Jen Siraganian, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat (translated by Fady Joudah), and Mira Mattar. The anthology’s title comes from a poem by Fargo Tbakhi. In discussion we quote a poem by Micaela Kaibni Raen. Find George’s poetry collection Birthright here, and here’s Noor’s Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow. George is executive editor of the journal Mizna. We also refer to RAWI (Radius of Arab-American Writers) and some previous anthologies including Salma Khadra Jayyusi’s Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, Nathalie Handal’s The Poetry of Arab Women, and Hayan Charara’s Inclined to Speak.

Episode 19: Kate Kremer - “Impossible and Interactive: How to Publish Plays”

We sit down with Kate Kremer, playwright and publisher of 53rd State Press, which now also houses 3 Hole Press and Plays Inverse, making it an essential hub of independent and radical writing for performance today. We discuss how one challenge in publishing plays could be that “nobody likes to read plays,” how to think about the relationship between text and production, publishing unproduceable plays, inciting future possibilities for the impossible, and envisioning “the page as the arena in which this event is going to unfold.” We also consider the dangers of replying to email, how financial pressures on theaters affect aesthetics, learning to write grants, getting your time devoured, the aftermath of covid, and building bridges between the literary and theater worlds. Kate offers some pretty brilliant thoughts on how success might actually mean “managing a consistent relationship with failure.”

Also mentioned are the playwrights, writers, and publishers Karinne Keithley Syers, Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, and Tyler Crumrine. Find more of Kate’s work here and check out this ep especially if you’re wondering how one single person could run an entire press and become her own intern.

Episode 18: Joe Hall - “Imperialism for Writers, or Empire in the Avant-Garde”

Ever wonder what literary orgs have to do with the state? Nonprofits with the CIA? Your own poems with military operations on the other side of the planet? Of course you do. Luckily, so does Buffalo’s own poet laureate of waste collection and public transit Joe Hall, whose recent essay “PEN America: Cultural Imperialism’s Avant-Garde” is a veritable syllabus on the ways arts and culture institutions serve the aims of American empire. In the essay, Joe offers an exhaustive analysis of PEN America’s response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, documents recent protest efforts such as boycotts of the PEN America Literary Awards and PEN/Heim Translation Grants, and conducts some nonprofit forensics and close-reading of PEN America’s messaging and leadership to connect their work to a broader project of American cultural imperialism. In our discussion, we reflect on the flattening effects of institutional language and the de-politicization of the arts, money and other forms of soft power, applications of the term “avant-garde,” how imperialism is a liberal concept too, and some of the ways writers can work to resist these historic political-aesthetic dynamics and collaborate with other workers to build a more liberated future.

Joe’s essay covers it all (ya gotta read those footnotes) but here are some more readings for your further reading, which specifically come up in this conversation: Ohio’s investments in Israel bonds; the killings of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer and journalist Ismail al-Ghoul; Palestinian-American writer Randa Jarrar’s expulsion from a PEN America event in early in 2024; Juliana Spahr’s DuBois’s Telegram; PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel’s 2004 essay “Smart Power” in Foreign Affairs; Fargo Tbakhi’s “Notes On Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide” at Protean Magazine.

Episode 17: Ryan Skrabalak - “Networks of Pleasure”

Strap in as we spelunk some of “indie” publishing’s murkiest and most nutrient-rich depths. Zach talks with Ryan Skrabalak: poet, teacher, cheesemonger, Deadhead, cool punk, and founder of the lively and exciting Spiral Editions. Spiral is a publisher of (chap)books, cassettes, a newsletter, and other pleasure-inducing printed objects and ephemera. As such, we had natural occasion to apply our focus to literature’s corporeal commitments, interrogating the imports, joys, and challenges of creating insistently-palpable pulpable culture in an increasingly disposable digital age. We meditate on editing, curation, book production and book-as-object, tracing grooves across music and lit overlaps to elaborate on forever-ideas about DIY, self-publishing, ISBNs, professionalism, adjunctification, the non-profit-to-no-profit pipeline, fun, trust, difficulty, and other social, political, and aesthetic commitments of the press. This conversation centers the historical traditions and psycho-material realities of making books and culture as an autonomous enterprise. Just don’t say micro-press.

A lot of names come up in this hour-plus because (he’ll never cop to it but we’ll assert) Ryan’s a bit of a historian. So, in the spirit of this as well as that of the fast-and-loose editorial hand, we’ll leave you with a litany: Eileen Myles, Bernadette Mayer; The Poetry Project; Tuumba Press, Lyn Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure”; Burning Deck, Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop; Angel Hair; Mimeo, Letterpress, Stitches, Papers, Printers, Toner, Rubber bands; Artbooks; Phoebe Glick’s The Afters; The Aliens; Cedar Sigo, Carlos Lara, Cody-Rose Clevidence, Mohammed Zenia; Tori Kudo, Crazy Spirit; 1080 Press; Coffee Cup News.

Episode 16: Lucy Biederman - “Koch Money, Catapult, Capital, and Real Human Language”

Hilary talks to friend of the pod Lucy Biederman to get her updated thoughts on the presence of Koch money in literary publishing—specifically, how the independent press Catapult, which has also acquired the great indies Soft Skull and Counterpoint, belongs to co-founder and CEO Elizabeth Koch, who is the daughter of Charles Koch (truly not a “black sheep” of the Koch family, though you’ve probably heard her called that). This episode was recorded before SPD closed but we gotta say this discussion of funding and literary independence and obstinance—and what happens when economic forces sever networks of longstanding relationships—seems unfortunately relevant in that context. Along the way we talk about excess and shit, paychecks and evil, class and how to try to write it, vulnerability and mutuality, Phyllis Schlafly, Succession, The Office, and what we as writers owe each other.

The writer’s strike mentioned is of course the spring 2023 WGA strike for film & TV writers. The Thoreau quote Hilary fails to remember is: “Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life,” which she learned courtesy of Peter Molin.

Sign up for Lucy’s brilliant newsletter “The Boredom & the Horror & the Glory” here. And here’s her terrific book The Walmart Book of the Dead.  

And this ep needs a lot of links: Lucy & Hilary’s previous essays on Catapult and Elizabeth Koch are in Fence here and here. Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right is here, and here’s Christopher Leonard’s Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America. The New York Times profile of Elizabeth Koch, her nonprofit Unlikely Collaborators, and the “Perception Box” may be enjoyed here. The Daily Beast’s follow-up reporting on Unlikely Collaborators and how it “received tens of millions from [Elizabeth Koch’s] family’s right-wing network last year and gave away less than $600,000” is here. We talk a bunch about a Guardian article on Chase Koch (son of Charles) and the venture “Stand Together Music.” Coverage of Catapult closing its classes and magazine appeared in Publishers Weekly among other places. Thanks to all these journalists.

To put the problems of Koch money in literary publishing in context, we think about the Sackler family, their involvement in the art world, and Nan Goldin’s beautiful acts of protest. We owe a big debt to Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty and Laura Poitras’s 2022 documentary on Nan Goldin, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.

Episode 15: “What Brains Eat: On Small Press Distribution”

Join us for a raw one as we respond in the moment to some real-time small press world-historical events (the end of SPD). With minimum filtration and maximum range, it’s an occasion to revisit one of our all-time favorite recurring topics in particular depth: Distribution. To us, distribution—the way a book gets from publisher to reader—exemplifies the whole matrix of logistics, politics, and aesthetics coupled with all the material considerations, problems, and choices that define the work of small press publishing. And it’s not just “small” presses that are affected by basic distro realities. These under-examined process nuts and business bolts dictate which books sit on shelves or don’t, what shows up in an e-commerce storefront or doesn’t, what a reader will find in a search or won’t, what can be cataloged and can’t; in other words, what literature gets to exist.

Come for a post-mortem on the dissolution of the US’s largest distributor of small press books, stay for a primer on small press distribution (the practice), admin, and biz essentials; a reading of what this moment means for literature and literary culture in the United States, and the role of small presses in the formation of national literature; SPD, Ingram, the Big Five, Follett; old friends, new enemies, revenge buys, reliable joys; archives, ecologies, recycling, red weddings, surgery theaters, slaughters, prizes, sales, scales, readers, breaks, poems.

If you’ve ever read a small press book, we love you.

Episode 14: Caryl Pagel - “The Text is the Site of That Relationship”

We finally sit down with Caryl Pagel (director of the CSU Poetry Center) and talk about her other job as publisher of Rescue Press. Caryl sheds light on the idea of “generative publishing” and on her approach to editing as a dynamic, open-ended process, a site of relation and the possibilities of form. We hear about starting a press maybe because you have a coupon at Kinko’s, and the contributions of Rescue’s whole Midwestern team: Daniel Khalastchi, Sevy Perez, and Alyssa Perry, as well as IforC’s own Hilary Plum and “the other Zach” (Zach Savich). Along the way we explore how to be both professional and a person and how professionalism may need both at once.  

A few of the Rescue Press books mentioned: Marc Rahe’s The Smaller Half, Shane McCrae’s In Canaan, Anne Germanacos’s Tribute, Caren Beilin’s SPAIN, Madeline McDonnell’s Lonesome Ballroom. Also Zach Savich’s Events Film Cannot Withstand and Diving Makes the Water Deep. 

Caryl’s recent books are Free Clean Fill Dirt (poetry) and Out of Nowhere Into Nothing (essays). Read a great new essay on Lorine Niedecker and Lake Superior here.

Episode 13: Ali Black - “The Black Experience from a Cleveland Lens”

In this ep we got to sit down with Ali Black, who inspires us (and many people) as a poet, writer, educator, and administrator from Cleveland. We talk to Ali about her new writing program for youth, “The Most Promising,” her 25 years of nonprofit work, taking young people seriously, the craft of organization, the role of honesty in collaboration, specifying community, the relationship between poetry and social media, and her deep love of Cleveland. Ali shares some great news about co-founding a new organization, reflects on her longtime collaboration with artist Donald Black, Jr., and talks about using her work to bring attention to her city. Along the way we also talk about reimagining the city on bikes in a poetry ride out, Literary Cleveland’s Inkubator Conference, Russell Atkins’s World’d Too Much, China Miéville’s The City & The City, and Taylor Byas’s I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times. 

Find Ali’s poetry collection If It Heals At All from Jacar Press here! And you’ll want to read her essays “Queen of All Spaces” and “Lessons Learned.”

Episode 12: Daryl Seitchik & Dan Nott - “How to Be a Little More Punk About This Sh*t”

Here we go with comics artists, educators, and publishers Daryl Seitchik and Dan Nott, founders and operators of Parsifal Press, a comic and graphic text imprint based in White River Junction, Vermont. Our discussion centers on independent comics publishing, where we examine its prevailing attitudes, aesthetics, and practicalities with curiosity about whether they differ from their counterparts in the world of text-based small press literary publication (spoiler: they do!). Dan and Daryl help us survey the scene of contemporary alternative comics/x alongside the rise of Big Five and mainstream interest in the so-called graphic novel. We interrogate ideas about literariness, self-publishing, and professionalization coupled to organizational breads and business butters like printing and distribution. This comparative approach proves highly illuminating, and enables us to think together about what writing is, what makes literature literary, and lessons we can all take from the time-honored traditions of transgression, foolishness, profit aversion, and DIY culture-making across genres and forms.

Some alphabet at the outset: artists’ books, The Center for Cartoon Studies, Dan’s Hidden Systems (Random House Graphic), Daryl’s Now and Other Dreams (Fieldmouse Press), Diamond Comics Distribution, Fantagraphics, Hilma Af Klimt, Kit Anderson’s Ignatz Award-nominated Weeds (Parsifal Press), Lynda Barry, Renee Gladman, zines.

Episode 11: Jeremy Wang-Iverson & Samara Rafert - “Publicity, Marketing, & Reminding Them We’re Here”

We gotta say, this episode is really useful for anyone who wants to learn about publicity and marketing outside the Big Five (or even inside the Big Five, for that matter). We talk to Jeremy Wang-Iverson of Vesto PR and Samara Rafert of the Ohio State University Press, who shed light on both the grunt work and the big uplifting moments of book publicity and marketing. We go pretty hard on metadata and keywords and we honor the extraordinary patience that publicity work demands. So much effort goes into any book ever getting “discovered,” and in this ep we’re glimpsing behind that curtain. Learn about “earned media,” blurbs, comps, the shrinking of book review venues that has changed everything, emailing (as always), the long burn of good writing, and how to publicize aesthetically, politically, formally, intellectually challenging work. This conversation includes lots of technical and industry insight, which means it’s also super relevant to the political work of publishing and how it makes culture and slips urgent ideas and art into big media settings. 

Some things that get mentioned: Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Jerald Walker’s How to Make a Slave, Hilary’s and Lucy Biederman’s thoughts on Elizabeth Koch (in Fence here and here), and articles on some problems with blurb culture in Esquire and The Atlantic.

Episode 10: Janaka Stucky & Carrie Olivia Adams - “Hunger for Awe”

In this episode we talk with Janaka Stucky and Carrie Olivia Adams: poets, editors, and founders of Black Ocean, an independent publisher based in Boston and Chicago. We inquire about the press’s early success and how they manage to keep such lasting power under the tenuous conditions of the indie book market, sustaining multi-title relationships with authors and making moves that include a recent merger with fellow small press Not A Cult to form the publishing collaborative Chapter House. Janaka and Carrie help with language to articulate the values of their entrepreneurial, mission-driven organization as we gloss the nonprofit-industrial complex, distro headaches, and good old indie hustle. If you ever wondered how to start a small press and then keep it running for 18 good years, this one’s for you. Deadlines and a spiritual practice can help, but be warned: you have to blow up your life.

Some Black Ocean writers who come up in our conversation include Joe Hall, Hussain Ahmed, Anaïs Duplan, Zachary Schomburg, Elisa Gabbert, and you should probably just check out the whole catalog along with Janaka and Carrie’s own books published by Third Man and Tolsun most recently.

Episode 9: Joyelle McSweeney & Johannes Göransson - “Keeping Things Lit”

Join us for an inspiring session with Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson, editors and founders of Action Books—as well as poets, translators, and critics who have given us books like Toxicon & Arachne and The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (McSweeney), Summer and Transgressive Circulation (Göransson). We talk about the storm-born origins of Action Books, its thinking of the avant-garde, poetry that “goes all the way,” the transgressiveness and provocations of small-press lit, definitely not publishing “the finest,” modernist dynamos, the volatile space of translation and how it serves as a model for collaboration. We all think together about being publishers based in the Rust Belt/in red states, and we celebrate some vital weirdness and iconic weirdos.

Writers whose names came up include Aase Berg, Kim Hyesoon, Don Mee Choi, Raúl Zurita, Blaise Cendrars, and Lara Glenum, among others—find their work at Action & beyond.

Episode 8: Joseph Earl Thomas - “Multiplayer Experiences”

Time to chat with Joseph Earl Thomas, a writer from Frankford. Joseph is the author of the memoir Sink, the Director of Programs at Blue Stoop, an associate faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and the current Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing & Publishing here at the Poetry Center (among other things). Our conversation centers those other things as we find ourselves dancing once again with the specter of professionalism, considering the mechanics of balancing professional, personal, and creative life, and questioning their divisions. We also talk about publishing with a Big Five imprint, the similarities between small press and “nerd” cultures, and spend some time thinking about regionalism, specificity, and literary economics.

It’s jobs, other jobs, other other jobs, homesteading, role modeling, video games, subculture, juggalos (Zach’s fault), MFAs, PhDs, and childcare. Not sponsored by the Atlanta Bread Company, Home Depot, or GameStop. 

More birds and cars in the background but what are we supposed to do, edit the world?

Episode 7: Suzanne DeGaetano - “Small Presses Are the Lifeblood of the Indie Bookstore”

We spend this episode with the inimitable Suzanne DeGaetano of Mac’s Backs Books on Coventry, the beloved indie bookstore in Cleveland Heights (and popping up all over the city) that just celebrated its 40th anniversary. Suzanne shares invaluable insights into the workings of an independent bookstore; welcoming people and sustaining community; paying the bills; changes in the industry over the past 40 years; the role of events, social media, wholesalers like Ingram, and neon signs; the longstanding relationship between food service and literary work; and more. This is a Cleveland-forward episode so get ready.

You’ll hear us mention some other great indies in Northeast Ohio, like: Loganberry Books, Visible Voice, and Elizabeth’s. And we’ll talk a bit about changes at Small Press Distribution (SPD), the stubborn persistence of print books, Bookshop.org, and our feelings about the phrase “slim volume.” Oh, and Espresso Book Machines do exist, despite Hilary’s choice of verb tenses.

It’s summer, so in this month’s eps you’ll also literally hear Cleveland—birds, wind, traffic, whatever—because it was hot and the windows were open. This podcast is an immersive experience.

Episode 6: Sarah Rose Etter - “How to Run a Reading Series (& Why)”

This ep is for anyone who ever wondered how to host a good reading or read from their own work because there is just not a lot of info out there. Join us for a fast-paced conversation with the writer and cultural worker Sarah Rose Etter, who may or may not be the best reading series host of all time (we say yes but she’s modest). We use the beloved series TireFire in Philadelphia as a case study to consider what it’s like to host a reading series, give some good advice and tips for those interested to start one, and talk about what makes for a great reading. Shout out, too, to the other luminaries of TireFire: Christian TeBordo, Annie Liontas, Jaime Fountaine, and Mike Ingram. Our discussion explores volunteerism, a taxonomy of contemporary literary readings, we talk money, how to build and connect with your audience, and how for better or worse “no one else is going to show up and sell your book for you.”

Check out Sarah’s new novel Ripe! And her 2019 The Book of X is out from the great Two Dollar Radio.

And if you’re in northeast Ohio, join us at the Lighthouse reading series in the fall and spring.

Episode 5: Rebecca Wolff - “Weird and Cool”

Join us for an hour-plus with Rebecca Wolff, founder and long-time editor of Fence the journal as well as Fence Books (disclosure: Hilary is a Fence author, we’ll get into it). We talk about the promise and problems of the ‘90s, “indie” structures and dreams, and the elusive concepts of “weird” and “cool.” Also discussed: professionalization, idiosyncrasy, money, obstinacy, being a “public art person,” writing emails, collaboration, and not being a brand (but what if that’s your brand). 

We talk about how Fence has recently transitioned to new leadership under Emily Wallis Hughes, Jason Zuzga, and other great editors—congrats! Sharing our excitement for the next stage of Fence. We also briefly touch on Rebecca’s time in local government in Hudson, NY. 

Find Rebecca’s new book of poems Slight Return over at Wave. And recently out from Fence Books: Harmony Holiday’s Maafa & Kenneth Reveiz’s Mopes.

Episode 4: Peter Dimock, Eugene Lim, & Ian Dreiblatt - “Hope Is a Word I'd Replace with Collaboration”

In this episode, we talk to the writers, editors, publishers, translators, publicists, librarians, & brilliant commentators Peter Dimock, Eugene Lim, and Ian Dreiblatt. We explore the future of the book, the form of the novel, the political potency of experimental writing and publishing, the monetization of attention, and how to value reading over books, reading beyond the commodification of content. We consider the book as testament to the principle that “everyone is valuable and everyone needs to talk to everybody else.” Along the way we find ourselves discussing apocalypse, the potential unrecognizability of the future, the coercion of optimism, the vitality and productivity of despair, and “joy in the triage.”   

You’ll want to find these: Peter Dimock’s most recent book Daybook from Sheep Meadow: The Notebooks of Tallis Martinson (Deep Vellum); Eugene Lim’s Search History (Coffee House Press); Ian Dreiblatt’s forget thee (Ugly Duckling Presse).  

This one was recorded—and is best heard—in the dark.

Episode 3: Matt Weinkam & Michelle Smith - “How to Bring It All Together”

In this episode, we talk to writers, teachers, and organizers Matt Weinkam (Executive Director) and Michelle Smith (Programming Associate) of Literary Cleveland, a (you guessed it) literary arts nonprofit here in (yep) Cleveland. We really get in there on jobs, work, what counts as “being a writer,” the necessity of cultivating multifarious skills as an artist, the erosion of the middle in arts labor economies, and paths outside the academy; email, 990s, nonprofit nuts and bolts; activist principles and good old “boring awful capitalist economics.” We also touch on the idea that New York is not the world and explore ways to think about region in the work of fostering local literary community and creating opportunities in Cleveland, a city with a troubled racial and economic history in the Rust Belt, or the Midwest, or both, depending who you talk to. 

Some things you should probably look into that come up in our conversation: Literary Cleveland’s course offerings, residencies, and opportunities for writers; Quartez Harris’s We Made it to School Alive; Stephanie Ginese’s Unto Dogs; Kevin Latimer and Grieveland; Belt Publishing; Gordon Square Review; the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, the Great Lakes African American Writers Conference, and Literary Cleveland’s Inkubator Conference.